Things That Made Me Feel Unnerved During Recovery

...But were actually ok and safe :D

1. The speed of physical healing compared to my mental progress

2. Feeling physically full but still mentally hungry

3. Feeling more tired the more that I rested, and more hungry the more that I ate

4. Feeling more hunger straight after dinner than before I'd eaten dinner

5. Sudden and drastic changes in hunger levels in a short space of time

6. Rapid mood shifts (from high to low or vice versa) in a short period of time for little or no reason

7. How my body was prioritising certain 'types' of food

8. How my brain hung onto certain non-sensical rules, even if i'd already grown comfortable with some 'harder' things

9. The quantity of food I was capable of eating when I truly let go

10. How life didn't open up immediately

11. How my recovery didn't seem to match up with the recovery content I was seeing online

1. The speed of physical healing compared to my mental progress

Even when I entered a committed recovery, it took plenty of consistency and reflection to eradicate all of the disordered pathways. After all, deep ingrained neural pathways don't just 'snap'!

Whilst this neural healing was gradually happening inside my brain, my body didn't hang about with rehabilitation towards safety. Its only priority was restoration - and quite rightfully so!

The good news was, that with this physical progress, my more nourished brain was better equip to make honest and intentional recovery actions. This, then, aided further mental progress. In short, I was able to do better once my brain was more nourished to have capacity to action my recovery.

I think it's also important to keep in mind that the rate of mental healing is less tangible and 'quantifiable' than physical healing. Even with commitment, my mental progress felt like it fluctuated considerably from day to day, and even hour to hour! One moment I was feeling positive about the direction I was going in. The next, I considered myself a hopeless case doomed to struggle forever.

Due to it being less easy to objectively track mental healing, it was very easy for me to lose sight of the valuable strides I had already taken in the right direction. In many areas, though I was not 'there' yet, the ball was rolling. Because I had made shifts from A->B, I had evidence that I could indeed move from B->C if I continued with integrity.

So, to summarise, due to the nature of neural pathways, it is inevitable that physical healing to happen more swiftly than mental healing.

If you wish to micromanage the weight of weight gain in your recovery, you will have to restrict. If you consciously restrict, you will not neurally rewire. That's why it is so incredibly important that you must to let go of the idea that you are in control of the rate at which physical healing happens. Yes, that is even the case if you feel like your mental healing is lagging behind your physical progress.

2. Feeling physically full but still mentally hungry

As you'll know if you've experienced this, the lack of alignment between physical and mental cues is an extremely uncomfortable sensation - both physically and mentally. Feeling physically full to burst, yet still getting the communication from my brain that I should eat more food, was one of the most confusing things I've ever experienced.

With consistent nourishment in response to all cues, alignment between my mental and physical hunger cues did happen. However, to be totally transparent, this did take time.

My body needed to trust that it was not a waste of energy to send physical cues. It wasn't going to do this without lots of evidence.

Also bear in mind that restriction reduces stomach capacity, stomach elasticity and gut bacteria diversity - giving physical symptoms suggesting you have eaten enough, when in reality, the body has grown used to inadequate quantities. Studies have also shown that anxiety can also hugely contribute to early onset fullness, which may play into warped interpretation of cues.

So, for now, really really try to home in on responding to the most reliable communication from your body of what, when and how much to eat: your nagging mental hunger.

This will show up all over the place, from unconsciously steering conversations towards food, to watching food videos, to fiddling with permutations of future meals and snacks.

3. Feeling more tired the more that I rested, and more hungry the more that I ate

When I decided to commit to resting more and eating more, my body did not hold up this extra energy as available for use. It used sed extra energy towards my healing. Though I expected to feel more energised when I allowed my body to rest, initially, the opposite was true. This really, really surprised me.

When you think about it, though, it makes a lot of sense. My body had to pay back the reserves I had depleted. I have an entire blog as to exactly why you likely feel exhausted in recovery if you're interested. You can read this here.

I also found it very unnerving that the more I responded to my hunger, the more I seemed to wish to eat. This was likely due to a vast number of things, including, but not exclusively:

• My body recognising that it had entered a place of food abundance. Being in this place meant it was actually 'worth' using energy to send hunger cues, and there may well have been a response!

• I developed a greater awareness of cues (that had actually been there all along but I had grown 'good' at dismissing or didn't realise were indications of hunger...)

• My metabolic rate was gradually increasing due to more energy availability

4. Feeling more hunger straight after dinner than before I'd eaten dinner

As described in the explanation about increased hunger cues above, my body was being savvy about when it used energy to send cues. It makes perfect biological sense for the body to wake up and ask for all the food when it is entirely sure that food is around.

Eating-induced hunger eventually stopped when my body wasn't frightened about wasting energy on cues. I did eventually feel hunger before mealtimes and satisfied after eating, rather than the confusingly opposite way around. However, this took time, consistency and patience, as my body learnt that it could trust me.

5. Sudden and drastic changes in hunger levels in a short space of time

During my healing, it was pretty obvious that my body was quite confused. And that's completely understandable after the state I'd put it in. The rapid changes in my hunger were frightening and also rather inconvenient. I remember so clearly being out shopping with my mum and going from feeling incredibly full from lunch to feeling light headed with hunger in the space of 5 minutes.

Slowly but surely, trusting that my body was working things out lead to my body trusting me. Soon enough, my hunger levels became more stable: hunger emerged gradually and fullness disappeared slowly. There were far less occasions in which I went from extreme fullness to a panicked hunger in a matter of minutes.

Chaotic hunger should not be met with distrust and judgement. It should be met with compassion and immediate abundance. If you get your maximal mindset and regularity down, unnerving occasions like this will reduce.

6. Rapid shifts in mood (from high to low or vise versa) in a short period of time for little or no reason

Perhaps due to a clash of hormonal imbalances and a highly anxious mind, I often felt a sudden cloud of darkness wash over me, from what felt like absolutely nowhere. For any Harry Potter fans, the most accurate analogy I've ever heard to describe this experience is that it is akin to wearing the Horcrux necklace too long. Just sudden, wild rage.

As well as these random swings throughout the day, I also often experienced days where I woke up, simply opened my eyes, and just knew that the day would be extremely testing. In the 10 seconds that it took me to realise that this was going to be a tough day in the office (of my head), there hadn't even been time for a triggering comment or anxiety-provoking event. I just felt rubbish.

As you sit with the discomfort of disobeying your ED, and navigate the inevitable emotional toll that challenging it has, there will likely be moments in your day where hope, strength and happiness surge and dip. There will also be emotions that come and go for mysterious reasons. In trying my best to observe them from a distance with curiosity, rather than jump into them and attack them, I was better able to distance myself from the feeling. It would pass naturally, and without disordered force.

Through recovery, your brain is being renourished to be able to handle a spectrum of emotions, and this will stabilise with further energy provision. You will also get used to experiencing and managing emotions - the highs and the lows. Being able to genuinely feel is not a negative of recovery. Emotional numbing and not having the ability to feel is not a true experience of life.

7. How my body was prioritising certain 'types' of food

In my recovery, my body cued me to eat highly energy-dense foods. Irrespective of my judgement of this, these were the foods that would help my body heal. Rather than expecting my brain to cue me to eat mounds of salad leaves (that I certainly did not have a deficit for...), it communicated to me to eat highly palatable, high-energy foods containing the nutrients my body had been deprived of. This took a lot of honesty to admit.

It's important to note that the 'types' of food that I was craving were not 'unhealthy' foods - as my ED suggested. Any food that furthered me from anorexia was my version of a superfood. The foods that were 'unhealthy' were the ones that kept me trapped in my disorder.

My lack of judgement eventually left my body's communications finding balance on its own. Still now, fully recovered, I entirely trust my body. I do not attempt any micromanagement over my cravings or intake. My body is on my side.

8. How my brain hung onto certain non-sensical rules, even if i'd already grown comfortable with some 'harder' things

During my recovery, I became increasingly frustrated with how challenging rules and rituals felt like playing a game of whack-a-mole. As soon as I had conquered one thing, there seemed to be an emergent rule popping up elsewhere. It's why Anorexia is often referred to as a Chameleon, or shapeshifter - it attempts to morph into a new (perhaps slightly more socially acceptable?) forms of disordered eating. As the ED attempts to clutch onto some level of control, different 'rules' often matter more or less to the ED. For example, a previous fixation of calorie counting may transition to Orthorexia. In this case, the ED may release such strict rules on numbers but insist that what is intaken is 'clean'.

Something even more confusing was the strange rules that my ED seemed reluctant to let go of, whilst 'giving in' sightly with other rules. One example of this was when I had grown confident with eating a certain full-fat yoghurt at breakfast, but that very same full-fat yoghurt didn't feel acceptable, or to 'fit' as part of my lunch dessert. There was no nutritional basis to this rule, since other desserts I did deem to 'fit' after lunch were nutritionally equal to that yoghurt. However, I simply had a block in my mind for that yoghurt going there.

Another example of this is how I grew comfortable with having pizza on a weekend - but not on a weekday - even though my weekdays and weekends weren't any different in terms of what they involved.

Similarly, there were other meals that I read other people with EDs were really, really frightened of, that I found completely safe. Simultaneously, there were other foods which an external eye would have likely viewed as 'easier' foods, that I found seriously challenging. Often, I wouldn't have even been able to offer up a logical reason why.

One final bizarre example was around having leftovers for lunch. (I smile at this now because I adore there being leftovers to eat for lunch now - it's so handy!). For a little while in my recovery, I found it 'safer' (and received less guilt) to have a more calorically dense lunch, than for repeated food 'experience' from one mealtime to the next.

In hindsight, I think many things like this were more ED-OCD hangups, than ED in isolation.

9. The quantity of food I was capable of eating when I truly let go

When I went through my reactive hunger (sometimes referred to as 'extreme hunger') in my recovery, my eating disorder suggested that nobody on earth had ever experienced this. It insisted that nobody on earth, ever, had eaten as much as I was eating.

Slowly but surely, I realised the truth: To heal from deprivation, one requires excess. No matter how much judgement I loaded into my body's requests, it would not make them cease. Any level of conscious restriction of this would leave my mental healing compromised, so, I had to pull my socks up and keep eating.

The analogy I often use to explain this reactive energy need involves imagining holding your breath underwater. When you are to emerge at the surface after your oxygen deprivation, you don't go straight back to a regular breathing rate that matches how you breathed before, or how others are breathing around you who haven't been deprived. You gasp and splutter and have higher 02 intake demands. This is exactly what happens when your body is healing.

Full nutritional rehabilitation requires an incredible amount of energy. There is a great deal of debt to be repaid and a slow repayment helps nobody.

10. How life didn't open up immediately

At the beginning of my committed recovery, I was certainly under the illusion that as soon as I swung into recovery 'properly', I'd be passing through the gates of freedom and be free to do all that I wished full of vigour.

However, much to my alarm, not only did it take a while for my energy levels authentically feel up to doing more, it took my brain a great deal of nourishment to begin to feel sparks of excitement and passion towards doing more.

To be totally honest, trusting that I would naturally escape this 'hibernation' phase - where my body had seemingly shut down for repairs - was incredibly difficult for me.

But, with patience and consistency, I began to feel more and more curious and energised for life beyond recovery. The same will happen for you. Trust the process. Focus on the now. Your body is on your side.

11. How my recovery didn't seem to match up with the recovery content I was seeing online

And finally: comparison.

The recovery community on Instagram is a difficult one to navigate. In hindsight, I can see how aspects of it actually really hindered me. In the online sphere, there is so much (almost endless) space for comparison. My favourite image to reflect on what social media is like is below. There is stuff going on behind the scenes.

Remember, Instagram (& YouTube etc) is supposed to be a constructive facilitator of your recovery. As soon as a resource begins to provide any harm - even if that's in addition to some help - it's use needs to be seriously examined.

Focussing on your most authentic recovery will be more valuable than replicating anything that you see online.

Han <3